Quotes

You can outsource your thinking but you cannot outsource your understanding.

kache (@yacineMTB) · February 2026

Amplified by Andrej Karpathy, who credited its author — and to whom the line is already widely misattributed.

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

Albert Einstein · letter to Carl Seelig, 1952

Translated from the German of his letter to his biographer.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads — and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.

Charles T. Munger · Poor Charlie’s Almanack, 2005

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.

Albert Einstein

From his late correspondence, commonly dated 1954 in the anthologies; the letter itself is unpinned here.

Look for people who have lots of great questions. Smart people are the ones who ask the most thoughtful questions, as opposed to thinking they have all the answers. Great questions are a much better indicator of future success than great answers.

Ray Dalio · Principles, 2017

We do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements.

Aristotle · Physics, Book I

The Hardie–Gaye rendering of the treatise’s opening — where the phrase begins; translations vary.

The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency.

Ibn al-Haytham · Doubts Concerning Ptolemy, early 11th century

A. I. Sabra’s rendering of the Shukuk; the passage continues that the investigator’s duty is to make himself “an enemy of all that he reads”.

Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy.

Elon Musk · TED interview, 2013

On first-principles reasoning — “a physics way of looking at the world” — in conversation with Chris Anderson; reasoning by analogy, he adds, is copying what others do with slight variations.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny…”

Attributed to Isaac Asimov

Unevidenced in his writing; the earliest trace is the Unix fortune file of 1987. A 1965 ancestor by Gordon Rattray Taylor has the scientist muttering “That’s odd”.

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

Jules Verne · Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864

Professor Lidenbrock to Axel; translations vary.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

Douglas Adams · The Salmon of Doubt, 2002

From his 1998 talk “Is there an artificial God?”, collected posthumously.

We ourselves (one single species) have taken over vast tracts of the inhabitable surface of the planet. Surely, we should allow those other creatures we share the planet with to retain some part of their ancient heritage.

David Attenborough

Widely carried under his name; a primary record is unpinned as of 25 July 2026.

The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?

David Attenborough

Often attributed across the conservation literature; primary unpinned.

We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves. With or without us, the wild will return.

David Attenborough · A Life on Our Planet, 2020

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Charles Darwin · On the Origin of Species, 1859

The closing sentence of the first edition; from the second, Darwin added “by the Creator” after “breathed”.

Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her.

William Wordsworth · Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, 1798

’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson · In Memoriam A.H.H., 1850

Canto 27; popularly mislaid onto Shakespeare.

The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as She is — absurd.

Richard P. Feynman · QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, 1985

The book’s wording; “quantum mechanics” is the circulated substitution.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Attributed to Albert Einstein

No direct record; the epigram first appears in Roger Sessions’s 1950 paraphrase (“he said, in effect…”). The documented ancestor is Einstein’s 1933 Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody’s easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

Neil deGrasse Tyson · The Sky Is Not the Limit, 2000

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

Daniel Kahneman · Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard P. Feynman · Caltech commencement address, 1974

From “Cargo Cult Science”.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

George Orwell · Animal Farm, 1945

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Attributed to George Orwell

Found nowhere in his writings; the ascription surfaces decades after his death in 1950 and circulates without a source.

It is common enough for writers to find that, in the very act of writing, they express ideas and beliefs which they never knew they had; a deeper level of their personality is revealed, a level hidden until then from conscious awareness.

Charles Le Gai Eaton · Islam and the Destiny of Man, 1985

In the eyes of history, religious toleration is the highest evidence of culture in a people.

Marmaduke Pickthall · the Madras lectures, 1927

The opening sentence of his lecture “Tolerance”, collected as The Cultural Side of Islam.

What is the character and general structure of the universe in which we live? Is there a permanent element in the constitution of this universe? How are we related to it? What place do we occupy in it, and what is the kind of conduct that befits the place we occupy? These questions are common to religion, philosophy, and higher poetry.

Muhammad Iqbal · The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, 1930

The opening sentences of the first lecture.

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?

Attributed to John Maynard Keynes

No contemporary record; the chain runs through Paul Samuelson’s recollections — 1970 on Meet the Press, then crediting Keynes in 1978 and in the 1983 Keynes Centenary piece that carries this wording. Churchill attracts it too.

Everything is liquid at the right price.

Trading-floor adage · origin untraced

Kin to the older dealers’ saying that everything is for sale at the right price; no coiner found as of 25 July 2026.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

William Feather

The Cleveland publisher-aphorist; primary locus unpinned as of 25 July 2026.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

A. Gary Shilling · by 1986

In print by 1986 and closely associated with Shilling, its likely coiner; routinely lent to Keynes, an ascription for which the evidence is very weak.

The investor who says, “This time is different,” when in fact it’s virtually a repeat of an earlier situation, has uttered among the four most costly words in the annals of investing.

Sir John Templeton · 16 Rules for Investment Success, 1993

The famous “four most dangerous words” is the popular compression; this is the documented sentence. See the essay This Time Is Different.

All through time, people have basically acted and reacted the same way in the market as a result of greed, fear, ignorance, and hope. That is why the numerical formations and patterns recur on a constant basis. Over and over, with slight variations. Because markets are driven by humans and human nature never changes.

Jesse Livermore · How to Trade in Stocks, 1940

From the one book Livermore wrote himself, as anthologised (the 1940 text varies slightly); not to be confused with Reminiscences, which is Lefèvre’s.

In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.

Warren Buffett, after Benjamin Graham · Berkshire Hathaway letters, from 1987

Security Analysis (1934) calls the market a voting machine rather than a weighing machine — never the couplet; the short-run/long-run form is Buffett’s, credited by him to Graham’s classroom.

But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

John Maynard Keynes · A Tract on Monetary Reform, 1923

The documented Keynes at last. The next sentence — economists set themselves “too easy, too useless a task” if they can only say the ocean will one day be flat again — is the point the compression strips.

Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.

Sir John Templeton

His signature cycle maxim, reproduced by his own firm; often misquoted as “die of euphoria”.

We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.

Warren Buffett · Letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, 1986

The first written form; the bare imperative “be fearful when others are greedy…” is the later popular compression.

It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.

Warren Buffett · Letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, 1992

Resurfaced in the 2001 and 2007 letters; usually quoted in paraphrase.

Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone.

Walter Bagehot · Lombard Street, 1873

“How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

Ernest Hemingway · The Sun Also Rises, 1926

Mike Campbell’s answer to Bill Gorton; “gradually, then suddenly” is the popular trim.

What we define as a bubble is any kind of debt-fueled asset inflation where the cash flow generated by the asset itself — a rental property, office building, condo — does not cover the debt incurred to buy the asset. So you depend on a greater fool, if you will, to come in and buy at a higher price.

James Chanos

His standing definition, given across interviews around 2010.

As a rule, Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.

John Mills · On Credit Cycles and the Origin of Commercial Panics, 1867

The Manchester banker, read before the Manchester Statistical Society, 11 December 1867; habitually misattributed to John Stuart Mill.

They mistook leverage for genius.

Steve Eisman · 2018

On Wall Street before 2008; kin lines circulate unattributed — “you thought you were buying genius; all you got was leverage.”

The whole secret to winning big in the stock market is not to be right all the time, but to lose the least amount possible when you’re wrong.

William J. O’Neil · How to Make Money in Stocks, 1988

Being wrong is acceptable, but staying wrong is totally unacceptable.

Mark Minervini · in Jack D. Schwager’s Stock Market Wizards, 2001

The line is the interviewee’s, not the interviewer’s — habitually credited to Schwager, whose book records it.

I never buy at the bottom and I always sell too soon.

Baron Rothschild’s recipe, retold in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator · Edwin Lefèvre, 1923

Reminiscences is Lefèvre’s fictionalisation of Jesse Livermore, to whom the book is habitually misattributed; its narrator retells the old Bourse anecdote.

There is a powerful case for the market mechanism, but it is not that markets are perfect; it is that in a world dominated by imperfect understanding, markets provide an efficient feedback mechanism for evaluating the results of one’s decisions and correcting mistakes.

George Soros

His Popperian case for markets — error-correction, not perfection; the sentence circulates across his own quote records without a settled first locus, as of 25 July 2026.

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Henry Hazlitt · Economics in One Lesson, 1946

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.

Milton Friedman · The Counter-Revolution in Monetary Theory, 1970

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

Milton Friedman · Monetary Correction, 1974

The documented form; “inflation is taxation without legislation” is the popular compression.

There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.

Herbert Hoover · by 1937

From his post-presidential addresses against the New Deal, as collected in 1937.

We have gold because we cannot trust governments.

Attributed to Herbert Hoover

Traditionally his 1933 remark to Roosevelt on the eve of the gold order; a primary record is unpinned as of 25 July 2026.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency.

John Maynard Keynes · The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919

No such statement has ever been traced in Lenin’s works — the attribution is itself the artefact. Keynes proceeds: “Lenin was certainly right.”

I have good news and bad news. The good news is we will all soon be billionaires. The bad news is that by the time that day comes, the dollar will be so devalued that your billions may not purchase your weekly groceries.

Jarod Kintz · A Memoir of Memories and Memes

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

Sun Tzu · The Art of War

A common English rendering; Lionel Giles (1910) has “supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting”.

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly.

William Shakespeare · Macbeth, I.vii

Macbeth reasoning himself toward the deed — and the deed is regicide; as much a caution about momentum as a spur to despatch.

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

Dwight D. Eisenhower · 1957

Remarks to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference, 14 November 1957, where he credits it onward — “a statement I heard long ago in the Army”.

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

Harrington Emerson · 1911

The efficiency engineer, addressing the clothiers’ convention, reported July 1911; a 1921 Collier’s advertisement signed only “EMERSON” handed the line to Ralph Waldo, who never said it.

Remember too that your time is your one finite resource, and when you say “yes” to one thing you are inevitably saying “no” to another.

Andrew S. Grove · High Output Management, 1983

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

C. Northcote Parkinson · The Economist, 1955

The essay’s opening sentence; the book, Parkinson’s Law, followed in 1958.

The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. … You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves. Nobody else can do that for you.

Andrew S. Grove · Only the Paranoid Survive, 1996

Abridged.

Find something you enjoy doing and give it everything you’ve got, and the money will take care of itself.

Peter Lynch · Learn to Earn, 1995

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

Steve Jobs

The circulated polish; the documented statement is his 1996 Fresh Air interview — “we hire people to tell us what to do … their job is to figure out what to do and tell us”.

There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say “wow,” and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.

Steve Jobs · in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, 2011

On the design of the Pixar building.

In God we trust; all others must bring data.

Attributed to W. Edwards Deming

No evidence he said it: by 1978 the pathologist Edwin R. Fisher was already calling it “a well-recognized cliche in scientific circles” before Congress, and the Deming link stems from an unattributed epigraph in Mary Walton’s 1986 book on him.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.

Gil Stern · by 1967

The American humorist’s printed form; ascriptions to George Bernard Shaw and to G. B. Stern arose by initials drift from Gil Stern. A 1939 Rotarian ancestor by W. H. H. MacKellar paired the steam boiler with the safety valve.

Oppression ruins society, while the ruin of society leads to the weakening and destruction of the State.

Ibn Khaldun · The Muqaddimah, 1377

From the chapter that injustice brings about the ruin of civilisation; translations vary.

History never repeats itself, but it rhymes.

Modern adage · commonly misattributed to Mark Twain

Earliest strong match: Theodor Reik, 1965. Twain, who died in 1910, was first credited in 1970.

History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.

Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner · The Gilded Age, 1874

What Twain actually wrote — the sentence the adage is forever mistaken for.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana · The Life of Reason, 1905

Routinely mangled to “learn from history” and lent to Churchill.

History is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

Edward Gibbon · The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776

Those who cannot adjust to change will be swept aside by it. Those who recognize change and react accordingly will benefit.

Jim Rogers · A Gift to My Children, 2009

Not one country in existence today has had the same borders and government for as long as two hundred years. The world will continue changing.

Jim Rogers · A Gift to My Children, 2009